After a fire devastated his apartment, Billy Cotton fled to Brooklyn, where he launched a design business. Now he’s settled back into a reincarnated version of his Manhattan home

BILLY COTTON’S first apartment, in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, was a collage of all the things he loved: a wooden bakery cart; a Joe Colombo lamp in egg-yolk-yellow plastic from his grandparents’ house in Boston; and a closetful of outfits for clubbing (“Commes des Garçons mashed up with remnants of my preppy past,” he says with a faint smile). It was 1999, and the Vermont native, 18, had bought the one-bedroom sight unseen before moving to the city to attend Hunter College. He buried its imperfections under a pile of gimcracks. “It was like Miss Havisham’s place—you couldn’t walk around,” he says. “It was my creative outlet.”

Then one day it was all gone. In 2002, a fallen candle started a fire that ripped through the railroad flat from end to end, sparing nothing, not even the floorboards. “I was studying Russian history and writing all these papers, and then my life burned,” says Cotton, now 35. “This was before the cloud. I lost everything.” He moved into the Chelsea Hotel—he still has the key to room 420—and asked them to take out all the furniture except the mattress. He wasn’t sure how he felt about possessions anymore.

The experience was an odd catalyst, to say the least, for a career in design. Almost two decades later, Cotton produces stylish furniture, objects and lighting as well as layered interiors for clients including art-world eminences like Cindy Sherman and Michele Maccarone. Everything he makes, from a sticklike floor lamp to a tapestried master bedroom suite, seems imbued with a purpose. “I love things—I love things,” Cotton says. “It’s what I do in my job, it’s what I make. But through that whole experience, I lost my need for them.”

THE NEW BLACK | Cotton with a leather campaign chair and a Paul Lee painting. PHOTO: STEPHEN KENT JOHNSON FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE

As he faced up to the physical consequences of his loss, Cotton found himself rethinking his lapsed education, too; he decided to try something he’d been “obsessed with” his whole life without quite putting a name on it. While rebuilding, and eventually subletting, his Chelsea place, he transferred to Pratt Institute, entered its industrial design program and moved to Brooklyn, where he later launched a studio in a former denture lab downtown.

Cotton eventually settled back into his Manhattan apartment in 2009, but he waited six years to do a head-to-toe renovation of the space. The footprint has remained the same as the original, but in every other way it’s new, down to the doorknobs. Not that you can tell. “I’m trying to bring back authenticity without being a slave to it,” he says, easing his compact frame into a black leather campaign chair in his living room. “I finally figured out how I wanted to live here.”

He started by doing the equivalent of turning on a light: He painted the floors, walls and ceilings of the narrow one-bedroom a Belgravian ivory (Farrow & Ball’s New White) that makes the whole place glow like a stick of butter. Recalling his days at the Chelsea Hotel, he reintroduced furniture sparingly. The pieces he lives with now deliver not just on a functional and aesthetic level, but on an emotional one: a gangly oak farm table he made himself; a sexy ’70s banquette from his parents’ first house, in Brookline, Massachusetts; a valet he bought when he was broke that adds a dash of European whimsy to his pared-down, Shaker-inspired bedroom. “It’s Jansen, one of my most prized things,” he explains. “I hold on to it amidst the simplicity. Maybe that’s my immigrant lineage—this idea that you have one piece of finery you’ve squirreled away from the old country.” (Cotton’s parents are both second-generation Americans; his mother is Irish Catholic, his father a Russian Jew.)

Subway tile and a recessed cabinet in the bathroom. PHOTO: STEPHEN KENT JOHNSON FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE

During his six years in Brooklyn—his studio and showroom are still there—Cotton built a business, taking on his first interiors project in 2007. Soon spaces became a daily focus. When a Hamptons cottage he’d fixed up for a friend caught the eye of artist Cindy Sherman, he found himself with a new client willing to take chances alongside her fledgling designer. “Cindy’s project was from the gut—it was everything I loved and had been thinking about my whole life,” Cotton explains of the enchanting, off-kilter house they made together in East Hampton. “It was a New England farmhouse; I was a boy from New England—it was my instinct. After that, I had to ask myself, What’s the formal language of this next project going to be?”

The furniture and lighting Cotton turns out are distilled explorations of design’s varied and noble past: stoneware mugs with abstracted chinoiserie handles; Donald Judd–meets–Don Draper cubic dining chairs. His interiors are similarly all over the map. For photographer Mirabelle Marden, he mixed striped Moroccan textiles with a reflective coffee table and technicolor carpets; for married scientists on the Upper East Side, he created a book-lined bedroom in the spirit of Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre.

“Billy’s spaces are elegant and have a comfortable feeling,” says artist Paul Lee, a longtime friend whose paintings hang in Cotton’s living room. “It’s like they didn’t happen overnight; they evolved. That’s how you make a home, by spending time in a space. He achieves that feeling.” Gallery owner Michele Maccarone calls the loft he designed for her on Manhattan’s Bowery “a regurgitation of my personality. Every element, in its refined chaos—it was almost like Billy was inside my brain.”

SENSE OF PROPORTION | The banquette in the living room was sourced from Cotton’s parents’ Boston home. PHOTO: STEPHEN KENT JOHNSON FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE

Nothing is chaotic about Cotton’s new home. When he comes in late at night, he can stand at the stove and make some eggs in a triangular kitchen that keeps everything within easy reach, graced by a backsplash of Paonazzo marble as serene as a Chinese landscape painting. “I do feel there’s a glamour to marble that has a place in urban life,” Cotton observes. “And not having tile lines makes the kitchen feel bigger.

"I love the history of the decorative arts,” he adds. “And the 19 million ways you can make a curtain. And I want to talk about it. But there is always a dialogue between that and how you’re going to go to sleep at night.”